


the particle and the wave

by alltheseghosttowns



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Spoilers, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21988042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alltheseghosttowns/pseuds/alltheseghosttowns
Summary: And here’s what Rey doesn't know, what she can't know, an unfulfilled promise pressed up against the sour sweetness of the truth: they had futures waiting for them, tenfold and plenty, all ripe for the picking. They had stories that played out unwatched yet unfolding, an unspoken refrain of millions of lifetimes blown wide with disuse. Rey doesn’t know they were an empire unto themselves, in the far distant reaches of unending space.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 48





	the particle and the wave

**Author's Note:**

> Rey is not coping. I am not coping. So, this is just me working through my many, miserable feelings post-TRoS. This is as close to in-canon maneuvering as I could get. I leave the proper fix-it fic for authors much more talented than myself. 
> 
> I hope you’re all getting by. And of course, spoilers abound.

****

There’s a distancing within yourself when your soul is halved. This is a truth that Rey has learned in the months after the war.

It catches her by surprise, those moments she senses herself pulling apart, and the enormity of it tangles her memories of how to breathe. The ache is an omnipresent thing, a hollowing that builds like an inverse pressure behind her ribs. But the chasm, when she lets herself fully grasp onto its vastness, rings against her skull; a supernova in microcosm, the rending of a heart.

Rey drops to her knees and curls in on herself, pressing a fist to her mouth to hold in the scream. She’d ravage her throat raw if she thought the sound of her voice would ever call back to her its echo.

But it’s no use, she can’t hear him now. And the emptiness continues to burn.

___________

Rey, the victorious, _dreams_.

She haunts her nights with unanswered questions, searching out the silence of a wraith of a man: her shadowed soul, the one thing to ever exist meant entirely and only for _her_.

And here’s what Rey doesn't know, what she _can't_ know, an unfulfilled promise pressed up against the sour sweetness of the truth: they had futures waiting for them, tenfold and plenty, all ripe for the picking. They had stories that played out unwatched yet unfolding, an unspoken refrain of millions of lifetimes blown wide with disuse. Rey doesn’t know they were an empire unto themselves, in the far distant reaches of unending space.

They won’t ever have the what-ifs, they will never unspool the possibility, because the future— _their_ future—is singular now, stilted on a pinhead in a dampened, black world. They won’t ever do _any_ thing of the everything that was laid out before them. They won’t ever celebrate Ben’s birthday, a date that he’s tried too hard to forget. They won’t get drunk on Poe’s homemade tar whiskey, curling under the weight of each other to block out the late winter’s chill and the thickness of movement in the world beyond.

Rey will never get the chance to wrap her fingers just _so_ around his wrist and feel his pulse stutter in response as she stretches and strains to span the breadth of skin and muscle so vulnerable to her touch.

And Ben will never know that the shape of his smile, so fragile and rare a thing, will come to help her sleep at night, as she’s chasing him in dreams, and the lack of him has resharpened her bones. He will never know that as a hungry, restless child she used to wish for something meant entirely and only for her. There are too many things he’ll never know now.

So she tells him. In her dreams, she empties herself of her secret, yearning hopes. She tells him, or rather, the _absence_ of him, of all her cruel wanting, and wakes with the frayed threads of potential on her tongue.

___________

In the moments between sleeping, she staggers through the never ending process of a galaxy’s worth of restoration. She smiles for every person who gives her one first, and she promises herself they’re real.

Finn’s eyes follow her as she soundlessly paces the _Falcon_ ’s corridors, and she avoids any semblance of her reflection, all too aware of the specter of the person she was once meant to be. Rey isn’t sure she can be the person they expect her to be. She falters under the mantle of castoff legacies and the weight of countless worlds’ relief. That she seems to have none of her own appears to concern only Finn.

He corners her outside of the marketplace on a stiflingly humid planet.

“Rey,” Finn says and she startles awake from her thoughts as she drifts along an unfocused path away from the now familiar noise of Poe’s trading with Akiva’s inhabitants. “Where are you going?” he asks her, but she knows him well enough to hear the true question behind his words.

_Where have you gone?_

___________

Rey, the final hope of the galaxy, _dreams_.

And in her dreams, she finally finds him: Kylo Ren— _Ben Solo_ —her mirror image, her counter rhythm, on myriad worlds. Some green and throbbing with life, where he once again brandishes his pulsing red saber and cuts through it all; others barren and wasted, where he watches her mutely, his expression echoing the landscape around them. 

Sometimes they fight. Again—more, _always_ —her saber slicing new marks into his healed flesh. Sometimes she hits him: skin to metal, and he staggers, rearing back as she lunges. Sometimes she hits him: skin to cloth, and she flinches at the contact, wincing as he turns into her swing.

But he always touches her gently: skin to skin, and it's these dreams that hurt her the most. They ache because for a moment they _fill_ her and Rey has once again learned to be empty, well-versed as she is in the rhetoric of want.

She breaks when his thumb graces her jaw and she screams for the want of the sound of his voice. His eyelashes shiver as his shape becomes less solid to her, and her voice hitches somewhere alongside her heart.

“ _Ben_ ,” Rey begs, digging her fingers into his tunic to anchor him to her in the mist of her dream. “Where are you going?”

_Where have you gone?_

___________

Rey is lying on a dune of yet another desert-born planet. The dark expanse of the night’s sky stretches endlessly around her and her overly dry eyes burn as she stares up at the stars.

Finn had sat with her as she’d attempted to meditate, hoping to soothe her with his solid presence. She knows he can feel the tear in her, the staggering abyss of nothing where once there very much was a raging, wild _something_.

She knows he will someday ask, but in the months of all their diplomatic missions, he has yet to broach the subject and Rey is hit anew with love for her friend. Finn had finally left with Poe to find food, after she’d once again failed to reach the stasis she so desperately seeks. She’d dropped back onto the warmth of the sand the moment he was out of sight, and rolled onto her back, tired and tender and so completely _without_.

Rey breathes in and out, counting her heartbeats in the lack of another’s. A distant star blinks and Rey feels the sticky blaze of tears as they trail along the sharp slope of her cheekbone.

_Be with me, be with me, be with me._

Rey inhales and Ben’s not there, she exhales and he’s gone. She closes her eyes and tries again.

_Be with me, be with me, be with me._

The bond responds, as always, with silence.

___________

Rey, the taker of names, _dreams_.

She watches the shapes they make on the wall, tangled together as they are, their images spread against the firelit backdrop. She senses Ben’s head tilt in the direction she’s looking and Rey turns her eyes back to him as he watches them: their shadow selves, fused. She wonders what he sees.

Their bodies are still now, except for the wings his back makes against the wall as he breathes, and Rey watches his face as he stares, transfixed, and she suddenly needs to know.

"What is it that you see?" she asks, running a fingertip slowly along the shell of his ear. _Darkness_? she considers as she follows a shiver through his shoulders at her touch. 

Ben stares another long moment before turning his head back toward her, night-dark eyes burning into her own. He closes them and drops his forehead to Rey’s collarbone with a slow, noiseless exhalation, and she feels it bloom across her skin. He runs his nose along the line of bone before he lifts his face to hers again. She sees the answer in his eyes, speaking for him where he can— _will_ —not.

_Salvation_.

“You’re not real,” Rey responds, her voice gone reedy and panicked, breaking on a sob. “ _Come back_ ,” she pleads, even as she’s as already as close to him as she can get.

___________

Rey has never skipped a meal, but food now feels like ashes in her mouth. The very real pleasure she once felt at the simple act of eating has left her, and she hates that she now finds herself forcing her way through.

Poe pushes a plateful of warm, delightful smelling Boganian bread toward her, and she blinks up at him.

“Eat up, whiz kid,” he tells her, warm eyes a tinge too knowing. “We have a long day ahead of us.” And they do, trapped in governmental talks as they are. So Rey takes the offered sustenance and tears off a corner, stuffing it into her mouth. She puffs out her cheeks for effect and it has the desired result. Poe smiles and stands from the table, clasping her shoulder as he passes.

She swallows around a dry throat, and glances at the stark rise of her too prominent wrist bones. The bread gets stuck somewhere in her chest and Rey chokes, coughing as she bolts from the room and rushes outside. She grabs her saber and runs blindly through her forms, hoping a ghost will distract her from the one that she’s become. Nothing comes.

She waits.

___________

Rey, the last Jedi, _dreams_.

“What would you want?” she asks him, her words quiet and pained, brandished continually in the voidspace of dreams. “If you had the chance. If you could choose.”

She asks him whenever she manages to find him now, at these junctures of promise and nightmare. His silence rings through her over and over and so she flings words at him like weapons, trying to galvanize him into a response. She’s lost count of how many times she’s all but begged him now, the question an ever-present burr stuck in her lungs.

_What would you_ want _? If you could choose._

On a snow-draped outer world created by the architecture of her mind, Ben threads a hand into the hair at her nape, and what can Rey do but echo him? She pulls gently at his hair, twining her fingers in its thickness, and presses her face to his chest. She _feels_ the deep tones rumbling through him before she hears them.

" _You_ ," Ben tells her, head dipped low so his voice murmurs along the skin of her neck. Rey is almost too stunned to shiver at the feeling, but her body responds where her mind cannot. "In any life, in _all_ lives, I would choose you."

Rey wakes on a gasp, rolling from her bunk with violently shaking limbs. She barely makes it to the 'fresher before she vomits, her ears ringing with the sound of his voice.

___________

Rey spends more time than not trying to piece together the meaning of choice. She knows she’s only ever made her own, despite all the variables outside of her control trying to pull her in directions she will not follow.

She pleads with the ancient Jedi texts for answers on the process of existing without the second half of yourself.

And when she doesn’t search, she searches still.

___________

Rey, of Jakku, _dreams_.

“Why did you go somewhere I cannot follow?” Rey asks Ben, eyes roving over the fullness of his mouth, begging it to move, to once again give her the sound of his voice.

_Be with me, be with me, stay with me;_ stay.

“Why did you make that choice?” she asks him, tracing fingers along the dip in his throat. He sighs, and his eyes are too soft, too bright.

“That’s why, Rey. _Because_ it was my choice; I was free to make it,” Ben responds, and Rey shudders. “I was _free_. And now there’s a brighter future. Now you _have_ a future.”

He smiles at her as his hand comes up to frame her jaw. Rey’s breath hitches in her throat and she drops her forehead to his collarbone and presses her fingers to his chest. She doesn’t feel a heartbeat under his skin, and even here, it _hurts_. Ben’s hand sinks into her hair, long fingers cradling her neck, thumb casting along the ridge of her spine.

“What am I supposed to _do_?” she asks, and her voice is stretched tight with fear and so much wanting, however quiet she tries to keep it.

He leans down and nuzzles at her hairline, presses his mouth for a long moment to her temple. She feels his lips move against the top of her ear, and the fierceness in his voice makes her whole body throb.

“ _Live_ ,” Ben tells her.

Rey does not tell him she cannot. It would be a lie, but an honest one. She wakes instead.

___________

Rey _dreams_.

****

**Author's Note:**

> Ugh. This movie was a mess, guys.


End file.
